


Wild Fragile Things

by sassafrasx



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, And Terrible at Magic, Blow Jobs, David is a witch, David's Past, M/M, Magic, Patrick's Car Sacrifices a Lot in this Endeavor, until he's not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:40:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21799258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sassafrasx/pseuds/sassafrasx
Summary: “When Alexis said you were a little bit magic, I didn’t realize she meant literally.”Patrick’s eyes are huge in the dim light of the backroom, and David can’t help the uncontrollable giggle that escapes him. His power — because that’s what it is, even if he’s never thought of it like that — has been slowly returning to his fingers, like an unused limb tingling back to life, since that first flicker he’d felt over a year ago, here in Schitt’s Creek.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 42
Kudos: 220
Collections: Schitt's Creek Open Fic Night 2.0





	Wild Fragile Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smoulderandbraids](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smoulderandbraids/gifts).



The first and only time David meets his grandmother, she blows smoke in his face until he feels dizzy with it as she clutches his chin in one claw-like hand, eyes boring into his through the haze.

“The gift is strong in this one, Moira. Very strong. Emotional thing though. You keep him in that city of yours and you’ll snuff him out, sure as anything. He needs to be out here, playing in the dirt, letting the energy run through him, feeling things the way he’s supposed to.”

David doesn’t understand much of what’s going on, but he does know that the house smells strange, a cloying herbiness that has nothing to do with too much cigarette smoke, and he’d rather not spend any time playing in the dirt or mud, thanks very much. Not when he could be at home, where the lighting is bright and everything is clean and Adelina can make him pancakes every morning.

“ _Witches_ ,” his mother hisses under her breath as she drags him out, his grandmother’s stern, craggy face fading behind them through the window.

David doesn’t know a lot at age six, but he knows he doesn’t want to be that.

***

“When Alexis said you were a little bit magic, I didn’t realize she meant literally.” 

Patrick’s eyes are huge in the dim light of the backroom, and David can’t help the uncontrollable giggle that escapes him. His power — because that’s what it is, even if he’s never thought of it like that — has been slowly returning to his fingers, like an unused limb tingling back to life, since that first flicker he’d felt over a year ago, here in Schitt’s Creek. 

But this, this is something else, he thinks, as everything in the room hovers an inch above the floor and the tables and shelves. As Patrick’s hands skim under his sweater, gripping his waist and bringing him impossibly closer than where they’re already tangled up in each other, the overhead light flares bright as the sun and all their things drop down again when David realizes what he’s done.

Panic claws at the back of his throat and David is afraid to look at Patrick again. _Please not Patrick, don’t make him leave too_ , repeats over and over, David frozen in his spot.

“Oh my god, David, _you’re magic_ ,” Patrick breathes and backs him up into the nearest table, hands sure in David’s hair, throwing himself ferociously into another kiss, and David can hear things fall ominously in the background as pure relief flows out of him. “Okay, okay, let’s just— somewhere else, before we accidentally burn the store down,” Patrick pants, with a giddy, feverish look in his eyes, and grabs David’s hand and tugs him out, into the night, laughter trailing behind them all the way.

***

At fifteen, Helena wrinkles her nose at him when their science experiment explodes on them during class. There’s no way she could know that he’d been unprepared for the scent of her hair as she’d leaned too close, or the softness of her hands, and the thrum inside of him had sparked, dull as it had become over the years. And yet— “You’re so weird,” she says, definitive in her assessment.

Not long after, David cuts his hair at an angle and slaps on too many colors and determines to stomp down on whatever last vestiges of this _thing_ inside of him remain. He’s long since realized that his mother has her own talents, that her magnetic energy which draws everyone’s eyes is not entirely a product of her acting talent alone, but something much deeper and more powerful; David, however, is just a frantic ball of anxious energy that makes everyone back away and cringe, and he would give anything to make it stop.

***

Meeting Patrick is like an electrical fire flaming through his skin, which doesn’t even make sense, because he’s snippy and overconfident and has no right to make David feel like this, not when David hasn’t felt a fraction of this amount of energy in so long David’s not even sure this is real.

But it’s very real, and it’s definitely happening, and David has no idea what to do with it when Patrick keeps showing up, makes up his own job in David’s store like he was always meant to be there.

David is _crackling_ and throws every last ounce of his energy into the store, pouring himself into it until it’s perfect. And with Patrick there, so orderly and tidy with his spreadsheets and plans and rows of numbers which all add up the way they’re supposed to, David actually can.

David can’t bring himself to tell Patrick that the lights he wired shorted out because David’s excess had to go somewhere, in the face of all of Patrick’s _Patrickness_ in David’s arms, warm and solid and too much for him to bear. David’s never wanted anything more.

***

He wakes up one morning, on the bleary side of twenty-six, vaguely aware of another body across the bed from him and little idea of where he is, or how he got there, and realizes he feels nothing at all, and hasn’t in a very long time. That livewire of energy that’s always followed him, under his fingers and deep in his toes, is just… numb. That thought should make him happier, probably, would have made him happy once upon a time, but all that’s left is a vast emptiness.

He wonders if he’ll be able to ask his current bed partner if they have any benzos to spare before he’s summarily kicked out. Might as well embrace the void while it’s still here.

***

The first time David gets his mouth on Patrick's cock, shoved haphazardly into the backseat of Patrick's car on the side of an empty dirt road twenty minutes outside of town, the car alarm starts blaring, headlights flashing on and off like their own personal horror-movie-themed rave machine in the pitch black of the middle of nowhere.

“Oh, shit, David, _shit_ , don't stop. Please, I'm so close… My car doesn't even have an alarm, _oh my god_ ,” Patrick chants, thrusting up minutely on each word, hand in David’s hair, patting and grabbing randomly like he has no idea what to do but is too overwhelmed to stop himself.

And David honestly can't even be fucked at the moment, because Patrick is cursing, for once, and his cock is just as thick as all their furtive grinding in the backroom had led him to believe. He could die right now, choking himself on Patrick's cock, and he'd die happy; so he just moans around the wide stretch of his jaw, high-pitched and half-wild with the electric heaviness of the air, of this moment, and shoves his own hand down his thankfully loose pants until he's messy — no, _sloppy_ — with saliva and come running down his chin and the overhead light flickers on and shatters, silence finally falling.

Well, fuck. That's new. He'd probably be more proud of the shocked awe on Patrick's face, highlighted now only with faint moonlight, if he weren't pulling his hand out of his sticky pants like a fucking teenager. What the fuck.

Patrick grabs his hand with a look of intense concentration, mutters, “David, I— let me—” And then seems to run out of words, swallowing dryly with a click in the back of his throat, before he licks at one of David’s fingers, tentative at first, and then in broad, wet sweeps, tongue curling around the pads of his fingers and across David’s palm with a small, tight groan that David is never going to forget, not ever.

The car stereo flips on, Tina Turner belting at them, while David’s mind goes completely and utterly blank with static at the sudden force of too much.

*

The next day, Patrick comes back after a suspiciously long lunch break clutching a large, beaten-up old book to his chest like a lifeline.

“So I talked to Twyla the other day, and she promised to find her grandmother’s spellbook for me. She was the leader of an entire coven, or something, it’s hard to tell with Twyla’s stories, but the important thing is… David, what you can do is amazing, you are _amazing_ ,” Patrick says with so much conviction in his wide brown eyes that David actually believes him, believes someone could think that about him for the first time ever, and he can feel the mints rattling in their tins next to his elbow, his gut heavy with warmth as he allows the thought to bloom slowly inside of him.

“But, David, the store, my car, _our future financial stability_ , desperately need you to learn some conscious control,” he finishes, setting the book on the counter with a resounding thunk.

The mints go still as David grimaces, chagrined. Patrick’s not _wrong_ , but, ugh. _Ugh_. Control. And all the other things David has spent over three decades ignoring, shoved deep down inside of him.

***

There’s something that flows out here, in this vast ruralness that David has trouble wrapping his mind around; something that goes much deeper than he can fathom and settles along his spine. David’s grandmother might have been a terrifying woman, but he can admit now that she might have been right about a few things. 

Stevie can’t stop giggling beside him, the joint long burned out as they lie side by side on the picnic table and watch the sun set. He has such overwhelming affection for her, suddenly, this new, strange friend — and what a novel concept that is. Her hair lifts up around her head; _David_ is lifting her hair and she hasn’t even noticed, at least not yet, and David laughs and laughs because it’s been over a decade since he’s done anything like this.

But he’s also never done anything like this at all, because for the first time it fills him with lightness and seems to fit his skin.

***

When Rachel shows up on their doorstep, the lights to the whole motel flicker and David thrums as energy whiplashes out of him; he knows in that instant he could short the power to the motel completely, shut down the grid for the whole town with the storm raging inside of him, but he doesn’t. He wrestles it down, because it’s not some foreign thing, it’s _him_ , and his, and always will be no matter if Patrick leaves him cracked wide open, today or in the future.

It’s not much of a consolation. Patrick would probably be proud of him, though, if he told him, he thinks bitterly as the door shuts softly behind Patrick's subdued back.

***

“I said, do you have another room for your occult merchandise,” Twyla’s cousin — David’s already blocked her name from memory — repeats slowly, like David is the dim one in this conversation.

“Why would we have occult merchandise?” David’s voice goes much higher pitched than he cares to admit. David may have come much more to terms with his magic since coming to Schitt’s Creek, but he’s still not prepared to have an actual conversation about it. And how the hell does she even _know_?

“Half this town is descended from witches. Why do you think the Schitts originally came here after Salem? It’s always drawn more than its fair share of practitioners. And whatever you’ve done to this place since you bought it, it’s like you’ve infused pure magic and love into every brick and slat of wood in this building. It’s the brightest beacon I’ve ever seen, and it’s going to bring in people from all over, this amount of power.”

“ _What?_ ” David doesn’t shriek, but only just. The last thing he needs on opening day is to scare off all their first-time customers by screaming about witches.

Twyla’s cousin is still looking at him like he’s lost his mind. “Yeah, everyone’s been talking about it. We’re all super excited. No one with this much magic has lived here in generations, and you have a shop!”

David feels faint. What the fuck what the fuck _what the fuck_.

“I’ll get someone to bring you a list of witches you should talk to about supplying your store. You’re going to need it," she says and finally leaves with a pat to his shoulder in pity.

He wonders, half-mad, how excited Patrick will be to know that they have the corner on an entire new market. If Patrick actually knew about the magic of course.

***

When David walks in after a week away, it’s like a sigh along the back of his neck. The store has missed him, he realizes. The store may be inanimate, but his magic isn’t, and it’s dulled a bit in the short time he’s been gone, and he rubs his hand along the wood on the counter, promising, _never again, not for anything_.

After the misunderstanding, and Patrick whisking himself away to lunch with an “ _u_ _nbelievable_ ” on his lips — despite all the things that David knows Patrick had thought were unbelievable which he’s never hesitated to accept, and he can’t stop the smile that splits his face as he knows he’ll accept this one too, like he’s accepted all of David — David looks around and he can see the future stretching out in front of him, full of hand lotion and magic books and Patrick's smiling face steady at his side, ready for whatever David and this wild, magic town bring.

And he loves everything about it.


End file.
